Quoddy Shoes - Made to Order Versions
ROLES
Retouching
CREDITS
Photography by Zack Bowen
The Quoddy project was two parts. The first part was straightforward: retouching footwear on a white seamless background — basic cleanup, creating a true white backdrop, and a clean shadow.
The second part was making the variants of their Made-To-Order options. This required being able to swap any piece of the selected shoe with the correct material texture and color, and then making that an exportable layer to be built into the website. Relatively simple as an overall concept, but like any job, you realize there is more to it once you dig in.
Each customizable section had to look good next to any other section — black, pure white, a saturated red, you name it. That’s where things get tricky. Good composites rely on how colors and shadows play nice together. A bright blue leather next to a stark white lining with no blue color cast? That messes with your brain. It's not wrong, but you know it's not right.
Sure, this type of usage suspends some disbelief. No one’s expected to think it isn’t composited while they’re picking options on the site, but we still need to represent the most accurate version of what that combo will actually look like.
Walk through of all options for one MTO, plus some combo examples
A lot of the magic came down to good selection planning. Deciding, for instance, which side of the selection the shadow should fall on, or how to handle a completely different sole shape. When switching the sole, we couldn't also switch out the base leather material next to it — we didn’t know what that would be. You might say, "That’s not a big deal, just create another version with a revised base for when the sole is chosen." But when you're talking about 5 sole options and 6 base leather options, you’ve just turned 11 file options into 30. And creating a backend web setup with multiple if-then scenarios compounded on top of selection combos makes the job bigger, more complicated, and more expensive. Our job is to do the opposite.
Weird or not, that’s exactly the kind of project we love: a little creative, a little technical, and maybe a little too much caffeine.
Three examples of MTO shoes with random materials chosen for each section
Compositing each section meant relighting textures to fit the shoe’s shape. Some elements, like the stitching, had to swing from deep black to bright white. So choosing the right original material and color wasn’t just helpful — it was the base that set up success for all the pieces.
A selection of material images provided from photographer Zack Bowen
In this case, the project came to me from photographer Zack Bowen after the assets had been shot. Thankfully, Zack is a seasoned commercial photographer, so he had planned ahead and captured all sorts of material variant options. Amazingly, with such a large number of variations there was only one time when a material wasn’t quite working as shot: the fur lining. To get a good selection with all the detail and a clean edge, I decided the easiest way was to shoot it again myself. Sure, Zack could have shot it, but the back and forth about what I was looking for exactly and him trying to interpret that and send options would have taken a lot more time. Zack was able to get me a sample, and I shot it in-studio to get the ideal base image for compositing: something with a contrast color edge, close-up for plenty of detail, and evenly lit to preserve highlights and shadows.
Photo taken in studio to create sheepskin fur lining edge
This — and a custom Photoshop brush based on the fur edge — had us off to the races.
Some examples showing different possibilities, including the fur lining
One other thing we learned quickly was brand new rubber soles are dust MAGNETS. Even having them unworn and handled well on set, many of the sole shots needed extensive cleanup. A shortcut was retouching one sole and then taking parts of the already retouched sole, or the whole sole, and using it in with the other shoes. You can see some before and after images below showing part of the process.
Close up of and example sole retouch
Example sole retouch
Example of replacing section of sole to save time
Fun fact: my size 10 feet made me the perfect “fit model,” so based on my feedback, you could say these are technically Made-To-Order just for me. (And just to be clear: no photos were taken during this process, so I maintain a squeaky-clean record of not selling feet pics on the internet.)
Bet you didn't guess we'd have a case study on shoes and choose now not to make a sock joke.
